Leader of the "Movement of New Forces", former Odesa governor and ex-president of Georgia Mikheil Saakashvili, whom the Ukrainian authorities accuse of seizing state power and aiding Yanukovych and Kurchenko, has assured that he does not seek Ukrainian presidency.
"I do not have ambitions to become president of Ukraine. An ethnic Ukrainian must be the Ukrainian president. Although ethnicity is a relative concept in Ukraine, but still it must be a person who was born in Ukraine and has lived all their life in Ukraine. I came to Ukraine when I was very young, but I was not born here and has not lived my whole life here," Saakashvili told Current Time TV channel.
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"[The last conversation with Poroshenko took place] in Malta in March this year. He threatened me and warned about the consequences. Then, however, he basically hinted at [deprivation of] citizenship - what he actually did later. And when I returned to Ukraine, they threatened me with concrete criminal cases. They said they would arrange for me a kind of 'Korban's' case," Saakashvili said [Hennadiy Korban, ex-leader of the UKROP party, was arrested on October 31, 2015 on suspicion of creating an organized criminal group. He left for Israel for treatment on the court's decision; in September 2017 he announced his intention to return to Ukraine soon].
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